Club Class vs. Sports Class

noel.wade wrote:

After all, the G-102 and Junior have much
better penetration and handicapping alone can't account for the
differences in their polars under various conditions!

How about a dynamic handicap? Using the logger files, you could evaluate
not only the wind profile, but also the strenght and diameter of
thermals and their separation, cloud base, etc. etc. and apply not a
handicap number, but rather a handycap matrix which is fair for all
gliders in all conditions. And don't forget to define a pilot factor as
well, otherwise the experienced ones would have an unfair advantage!

You know that you have your parameters and the formula correct when,
after normalizing the results, everybody gets 1000 points.

At 19:47 23 September 2008, noel.wade wrote:

Look at an individual sport like Bowling or Golf: Do you really think
that the handicap there makes everyone play at the same level? What
about the guy who can afford better clubs or a custom-drilled bowling-
ball? Does the handicap take that into account? No!

Actually, I think it *does* for bowling and golf. The handicap in both
cases is based on the prior performance record of the individual
competitor; if he's working with better equipment, that will show up as
better performance. Hard for me to see how the same approach could work
in racing gliders, but then again I know almost nothing about competition
- my very limited racing has been confined mostly to 1-26s. I *was* part
of a bowling team at work for a couple of years, though. Mostly we just
went bowling to drink beer and tell jokes. I've seen a lot of that going
on at glider contests, too.

Jim Beckman

Just to throw my 2 cents into this debate...

I come at this as a former US Club Class Team member who owns a club
class glider and loves the club class concept BUT one that has put
himself on the "Black List" of pilots banned from competing in Club
Class due to flying another WGC in a non-club, world, junior class. I
would definitely fly a Club Class event here in the US rather than a
Sports Class event at any level - it is fairer! Even more so at a Club
Class Nationals if I could get back on the team ;-(

Getting a US Club Class Nationals (integrated with US Sports Nats
which I support as a 1st step to possible independence of the class)
will allow people who fly club class ships the opportunity for fairer
racing amongst a smaller range of handicapped ships AND allow for
flying Assigned Tasks (AT's) like the rest of the classes here in the
US get to fly. Flying AT's is fun and really lets you measure your
skills on a fixed course on any particular day against the best pilots
who fly. I know that there are those who would ban all AT-type tasks
in the interest of safety, but they are fun AND the Club Class around
the world lets older gliders fly AT's whereas our Sports Class makes
this fairly impossible or extremely unfair to the "lower" performance
ships.

Getting to the Team topoic, one thing I beleive our club class team
members are missing from their experience when they go to Club Class
Worlds is that, coming out of the US Sports Class, many of them HAVE
NEVER FLOWN an Assigned Task in a club class ship in their qualifiying
for the team. And if they are a Sports Class only competitior having
flown contests only in Sports Class, they will NEVER have flown an AT
until they get sent on a 500km AT in the mountains of France with
thunderstorms likely (as was done in France 2006).

Getting competitive pilots on the US Club Class Team requires having
practice and experience at Club Class racing prior to getting
overseas. The only way this works is to enable Club Class pilots to be
better developed here at home. How we do this is to provide for Club
Class contests here at home. Whether or not they are integrated with
other classes at the national level or as a stand alone nationals is
irrelevant. The need for the class both to better develop our team
members AND to provide for better and fairer racing for all who wish
to should be the end goal here.

One additional thing that never gets said in this debate is that the
Ruels Committeee has no way of knowing what non-competition pilots
would be spurred into club class flying if the Club Class was added
tot he list of competing classes. If they send the SRA poll to
existent contest pilots only and you ask to add another class... well
then off course you are going to perceiving a further fracturing of
the currently existing base of contest pilots.

The question that needs to be asked and has never been fairly
addressed by the SRA poll is the following: If you are a glider pilot
having access to or flying a club class-type glider and do not
currently compete: Would the addition of Club Class events at the
regional and national level encourage you to get racing?

Get me a meaningful answer to that question and we may see that adding
Club Class may, in fact, expand the base of contest pilots and then
everyone wins. We just dont know and fears of "further dividing up"
the existing contest pilot population are unfounded until we get that
answer.

Tim McAllister EY

Also, If we really wanted a "Club Class" in the USA that was
representative of most Club fleets, we'd see an AWFUL lot of G-102s,
Schweizer metal birds, and Blaniks or Twin Astirs... *Maybe a Junior,
for the "high dollar" folks! *Anyone with a glider produced after the
mid 1970's would be disqualified! *
*sigh*
--Noel


Does anyone remember that the region 9 (which had standard, sports,
15m and 18m classes) in Parowan, the Sports Class winner was a Grob
Twin Astir? That ship needed so much work done and was so old, that
it was a "family joke" among the region 9 pilots. However, that was
the same pilot (Nick Kennedy) that was standing on the winning podium
every single day of the 7 day contest.

I have to tell you too, that the Sparrowhawk also won a day or two.
Of course, I did have to make a joke, and give the pilot of the
Sprarrowhawk (Bill Thar) a D-cell battery as a prize. Mike the Strike
was right, the tasking was different, however, I also had another
pilot at the 2008 parowan contest that had NEVER flown in a contest
before mentioning (after his gut wrenching screams, of I DID IT...I
DID IT) that he learned more in one week of a contest, than a year of
flying at the club. He flew an older ship (Ventus, but most of his
flying was in a Zuni II). If a contest is aware of the ships that
have entered, it can be fun, exciting, and a learning experience, no
matter what type of ship you are flying. Also, a lot of people forget
that contests are not just for winning trophies...they are training,
learning, and challenging yourself.

Just my 2cents.
micki

On Sep 24, 1:00*am, John Smith wrote:
noel.wade wrote:
After all, the G-102 and Junior have much
better penetration and handicapping alone can't account for the
differences in their polars under various conditions!

How about a dynamic handicap? Using the logger files, you could evaluate
not only the wind profile, but also the strenght and diameter of
thermals and their separation, cloud base, etc. etc. and apply not a
handicap number, but rather a handycap matrix which is fair for all
gliders in all conditions. And don't forget to define a pilot factor as
well, otherwise the experienced ones would have an unfair advantage!

You know that you have your parameters and the formula correct when,
after normalizing the results, everybody gets 1000 points.

Interesting.

I thought about this idea a bit a couple of years back. I think it
would be possible to come up with something analytically on the basis
of pilot seeding, average climb strength, average altitude, wind and
maybe some task-specific attributes. You do have to be able to
separate out pilot skill from sailplane performance when you do it and
I suspect there is some autocorrelation between the two. Something
simpler might be increasing the spread in handicaps as task distance
increases, since task distance is a decent indicator for a lot of the
other factors you'd want to consider (except wind).

The problem, and the reason I dismissed the idea, is that it is
cumbersome, would potentially lead to a lot of arguing about how each
day gets measured and further obfuscates the scoring process -- not to
mention the burden on the scorer.

The other problem is that one of the issues for very low performance
ships in particular is the risk of outlanding - which goes up as the
tasks get more challenging. Because you are adjusting handicaps on the
basis of long-term averages, you would likely see lots of points
lavished on the pilots in low-performing ships just for getting around
the course on challenging days. As a consequence you could end up with
a handicap system that pushes pilots in low-performing ships to the
top of the scoresheet in the, say, 2 out of 5 contests where they can
get around the course every day, but finds them at the bottom of the
scoresheet in the contests where they have a landout. On average they
are in the middle, but they end up winning a disproportionate share of
contests. BB wrote a very interesting article on this in terms of
overall contest strategy irrespective of handicaps. The current
handicap system has a bit of this built in already - increasing the
spreads might make it worse rather than better.

The conclusion I came to is that the current system works well enough
for most Std and 15M ship of late-70s vintage on up. The Sports Class
is and should be optimized around a typical mid-80s 15M and Std
gliders (basically, Club Class, that is). If you want to fly
something outside these parameters you need to accept the fact that
the scoring system can't totally level the playing field for you, but
in the end you probably aren't expecting to be on the podium - and
that's okay. At least you still get to fly with everybody else and
learn about racing. I have a slightly different view on 2-seaters, but
that's a topic for a whole different thread.

The idea of restricting team selection to people flying Club Class
gliders only I think is a red herring because the scoring system and
contest rules are optimized around these gliders already so the odds
that someone flying an ASK-14 is going to get on the US team is
impossibly low (if they did they'd have earned it). The arguments
about low performing gliders dragging the tasking down should be
resolved through better training of CDs on how to call tasks and in
particular by realizing that you can't optimize task calling for the
lowest common denominator - that's not the main purpose of Sports
Class. If someone wants to fly a 2-33 in a Regionals they better have
a big crew and a trailer ready to go.

9B

On Sep 24, 11:49*am, Tim wrote:
Just to throw my 2 cents into this debate...

I come at this as a former US Club Class Team member who owns a club
class glider and loves the club class concept BUT one that has put
himself on the "Black List" of pilots banned from competing in Club
Class due to flying another WGC in a non-club, world, junior class. I
would definitely fly a Club Class event here in the US rather than a
Sports Class event at any level - it is fairer! Even more so at a Club
Class Nationals if I could get back on the team ;-(

Getting a US Club Class Nationals (integrated with US Sports Nats
which I support as a 1st step to possible independence of the class)
will allow people who fly club class ships the opportunity for fairer
racing amongst a smaller range of handicapped ships AND allow for
flying Assigned Tasks (AT's) like the rest of the classes here in the
US get to fly. Flying AT's is fun and really lets you measure your
skills on a fixed course on any particular day against the best pilots
who fly. I know that there are those who would ban all AT-type tasks
in the interest of safety, but they are fun AND the Club Class around
the world lets older gliders fly AT's whereas our Sports Class makes
this fairly impossible or extremely unfair to the "lower" performance
ships.

Getting to the Team topoic, one thing I beleive our club class team
members are missing from their experience when they go to Club Class
Worlds is that, coming out of the US Sports Class, many of them HAVE
NEVER FLOWN an Assigned Task in a club class ship in their qualifiying
for the team. And if they are a Sports Class only competitior having
flown contests only in Sports Class, they will NEVER have flown an AT
until they get sent on a 500km AT in the mountains of France with
thunderstorms likely (as was done in France 2006).

Getting competitive pilots on the US Club Class Team requires having
practice and experience at Club Class racing prior to getting
overseas. The only way this works is to enable Club Class pilots to be
better developed here at home. How we do this is to provide for Club
Class contests here at home. Whether or not they are integrated with
other classes at the national level or as a stand alone nationals is
irrelevant. *The need for the class both to better develop our team
members AND to provide for better and fairer racing for all who wish
to should be the end goal here.

One additional thing that never gets said in this debate is that the
Ruels Committeee has no way of knowing what non-competition pilots
would be spurred into club class flying if the Club Class was added
tot he list of competing classes. If they send the SRA poll to
existent contest pilots only and you ask to add another class... well
then off course you are going to perceiving a further fracturing of
the currently existing base of contest pilots.

The question that needs to be asked and has never been fairly
addressed by the SRA poll is the following: If you are a glider pilot
having access to or flying a club class-type glider and do not
currently compete: Would the addition of Club Class events at the
regional and national level encourage you to get racing?

Get me a meaningful answer to that question and we may see that adding
Club Class may, in fact, expand the base of contest pilots and then
everyone wins. We just dont know and fears of "further dividing up"
the existing contest pilot population are unfounded until we get that
answer.

Tim McAllister EY

Tim makes some excellent points.
It should be noted, however, that the same discrimination against
previous US team members(other than Club) being on the Club team,
helped open the door for Tim, and some others, to get to go to the
"Big Show". This policy may not put the best pilots in the US on the
team, but it does provide a way to develop new talent. Sadly, mot
enough pilots seem to be aware, or interested, in this opportunity.
AST experience. I don't know of any Club team member who has not had
AST experience. It is true that a pilot coming up only in Sports could
end up in this situation in the future. I know Tim had it because I
watched him fly his Libelle against current technology ships and get
his a** handed to him. He smiled all the way, had fun, and learned a
lot.
Tim's point about about the question of who isn't coming now and would
if we had an active Club class is a good one which was on the poll
draft list at one time and not used. Clearly this is a key point. The
single largest driving force for creating another class is if it will
increase participation enough to justify the offsetting negatives.
If you are a pilot who would fall into this catagory, we would like to
hear from you, so please ring in at on this.
I'll report back later on what I hear.
Thanks for ringing in Tim.
UH

On Sep 24, 8:49*am, Tim wrote:
Just to throw my 2 cents into this debate...

I come at this as a former US Club Class Team member who owns a club
class glider and loves the club class concept BUT one that has put
himself on the "Black List" of pilots banned from competing in Club
Class due to flying another WGC in a non-club, world, junior class. I
would definitely fly a Club Class event here in the US rather than a
Sports Class event at any level - it is fairer! Even more so at a Club
Class Nationals if I could get back on the team ;-(

Getting a US Club Class Nationals (integrated with US Sports Nats
which I support as a 1st step to possible independence of the class)
will allow people who fly club class ships the opportunity for fairer
racing amongst a smaller range of handicapped ships AND allow for
flying Assigned Tasks (AT's) like the rest of the classes here in the
US get to fly. Flying AT's is fun and really lets you measure your
skills on a fixed course on any particular day against the best pilots
who fly. I know that there are those who would ban all AT-type tasks
in the interest of safety, but they are fun AND the Club Class around
the world lets older gliders fly AT's whereas our Sports Class makes
this fairly impossible or extremely unfair to the "lower" performance
ships.

Getting to the Team topoic, one thing I beleive our club class team
members are missing from their experience when they go to Club Class
Worlds is that, coming out of the US Sports Class, many of them HAVE
NEVER FLOWN an Assigned Task in a club class ship in their qualifiying
for the team. And if they are a Sports Class only competitior having
flown contests only in Sports Class, they will NEVER have flown an AT
until they get sent on a 500km AT in the mountains of France with
thunderstorms likely (as was done in France 2006).

Getting competitive pilots on the US Club Class Team requires having
practice and experience at Club Class racing prior to getting
overseas. The only way this works is to enable Club Class pilots to be
better developed here at home. How we do this is to provide for Club
Class contests here at home. Whether or not they are integrated with
other classes at the national level or as a stand alone nationals is
irrelevant. *The need for the class both to better develop our team
members AND to provide for better and fairer racing for all who wish
to should be the end goal here.

One additional thing that never gets said in this debate is that the
Ruels Committeee has no way of knowing what non-competition pilots
would be spurred into club class flying if the Club Class was added
tot he list of competing classes. If they send the SRA poll to
existent contest pilots only and you ask to add another class... well
then off course you are going to perceiving a further fracturing of
the currently existing base of contest pilots.

The question that needs to be asked and has never been fairly
addressed by the SRA poll is the following: If you are a glider pilot
having access to or flying a club class-type glider and do not
currently compete: Would the addition of Club Class events at the
regional and national level encourage you to get racing?

Get me a meaningful answer to that question and we may see that adding
Club Class may, in fact, expand the base of contest pilots and then
everyone wins. We just dont know and fears of "further dividing up"
the existing contest pilot population are unfounded until we get that
answer.

Tim McAllister EY

You've been on the team so your view automatically gets my attention
Tim.

One way to test most of your ideas would be to at least do a separate
scoring for Club Class ships within the next Sports Nationals - it
wouldn't take any rules changes to do it and you could even give out a
Joe Giltner-type award for the Club Class "winner". It wouldn't give
the AST experience you're looking for, but call a few MATs with more
than a couple of assigned turnpoints and you'll get most of the
effect. I find the AST the easiest to fly - dodging weather not
withstanding - but I grew up in racing with only ASTs so I'm used to
it. Back then just navigating the course was often my biggest
challenge. :-)

I still think at the regional level you are going to divide up the
classes too much and that overall Sports Class is a better solution to
the challenges facing soaring competition in the US, as well as for
picking US team members.

9B

snip
Noel,

I seem to not be explaining myself well about the handicap system that
I want. * I want a simple 1 number system like we currently use. *But
that only works well when the handicap range is small. *That's why I
snip
Todd
3S

Todd that is effectively what we have with the sports class and is
probably the way it should be in my opinion.
The high performing ships that really outclass the majority tend to
have very low handicap numbers that tend to make them difficult to be
competitive in most sport class competitions. The really low
performance ships are hard to be competitive in simply because it can
be difficult to consisitantly complete the tasks. So usually the only
reason low performance and really high performance ships compete in
sport class is becuase there isn't a better place for them to compete.
The real racing occures in the middle somewhere.

Just my opinion.

Brian
CFIIG/ASEL
HP16T N16VP.

On Sep 24, 3:22*pm, wrote:

I still think at the regional level you are going to divide up the
classes too much and that overall Sports Class is a better solution to
the challenges facing soaring competition in the US, as well as for
picking US team members.

As a newcomer (who thinks international competiton is cool but
realizes that it is highly unlikely that I'll do it), I couldn't agree
more with 9B's comments.

The US Team comprises such a small percentage of the glider-pilots in
the USA. Its a point of pride to have top finishers at the
International competiton; but I don't want to see my Regionals suffer
just so a a couple of different names get to go overseas once every
year or two.

And the issue of participation goes beyond the "number of entrants per
class" issue. It also speaks to the QUALITY of the pilots I fly
against... If they're scattered between too many classes then I'm not
really getting a chance to fly against the best, am I?

--Noel